Pod Insights Endless Thread Episodes We Love: How to Fight a Shark About this episode This episode originally aired on July 12, 2024. It has been updated to more clearly represent communication with Kayleigh Grant about a conversation with Kristian Parton.
When Endless Thread producer Grace Tatter heard a friend assert that she could ward off a shark because of TikTok, Grace was both concerned for her friend's safety, and curious. Why are there so many videos about "redirecting" sharks on TikTok, and how accurate are they?
Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson dive into the controversial world of SharkTok, where influencers are trying to show a different side of sharks by getting up close and personal with them.
Show notes:
Mermaid Kayleigh https://www.instagram.com/p/CzuIaeySr_V/?hl=en (Instagram)
Welcome to Shark Bytes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrtEC3OySBo (YouTube)
Steven Spielberg https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001g8m4 on the BBC's Desert Island Disks
A diver's extremely close visit with a great white shark went viral. Marine biologists say don't copy her. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/18/womans-extremely-close-visit-with-giant-great-white-shark-went-viral-marine-biologists-say-dont-copy-her/ (Washington Post)Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter with Cici Yu. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. It was hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Amory Sivertson? Hello, Endless Thread heads. It's the Fourth of July weekend, and this year is the 50th anniversary of Jaws, a movie that, of course, has made generations of summer swimmers terrified of sharks, to the species detriment, I would say. So we're revisiting an episode from last year about the TikTok influencers who want to teach you what to do if you encounter a shark, and some of the scientists who are not so sure about their advice. And one of the influencers that you'll hear about, Ocean Ramsey, is the subject of a new documentary on Netflix called Shark Whisperer. So let's put on our goggles and
1:45 Amory Sivertson? our flippies and dive in. Oh, but wait, I do just want to say, you're going to hear Ben make fun of me at the top of this episode for not being a good swimmer, and I want you to know I've been taking swim lessons for about six months now. So, kind of proud of myself, just putting it out there. Okay, here's the episode.
2:13 Speaker 04 WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
2:22 Ben Brock Johnson? Emory, as an expert swimmer, I need to ask you a question.
2:28 Amory Sivertson? Reporting for duty. Yes.
2:32 Ben Brock Johnson? Reporting for doggy paddle.
2:35 Amory Sivertson? You know, I've tried to sign up for swim lessons so many times, they're all full.
2:39 Ben Brock Johnson? Sure they are.
2:39 Amory Sivertson? If I die at sea, it's the children's fault.
2:42 Ben Brock Johnson? I don't think the guppy lessons are full. I feel like you could, you could probably get into there. All right. My question is, how would you defend yourself from an attacking shark?
2:54 Amory Sivertson? Hmm. I feel like I've heard you're supposed to like punch them right in the nose, right?
2:59 Ben Brock Johnson? Yes. Yes, that is what you've heard.
3:03 Amory Sivertson? Okay. And I'd probably go for the eyes, too.
3:06 Ben Brock Johnson? Okay.
3:06 Amory Sivertson? Go like, big scratch. I don't really have nails, but I'd try to scratch their eyes out.
3:11 Ben Brock Johnson? So this is also the response I would give if you asked me this question. And, you know, like, that feels like an obvious answer. It feels like a thing that we know, right? But our producer, Grace Tatter, did not feel this way.
3:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, I, I guess the shark lessons have been full whenever I've looked to sign up because I had never heard this advice before. But a few months ago, I was at a dinner party and I made a discovery.
3:39 Ben Brock Johnson? You discovered that the main course was shark.
3:41 Speaker 06 No, thank God. Unless you consider it the main course of conversation, for a minute at least. We were at my friend's apartment in Brooklyn for a very belated Friendsgiving, very, very belated, like into the next calendar year.
3:56 Amory Sivertson? That's just a Friends dinner. It doesn't need to be a Friends. Yeah.
4:00 Ben Brock Johnson? It's not. I mean, you can give thanks for it, but it's not.
4:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, sure. But anyway, we're all gathered for this potluck dinner and I overhear my friend Emily arguing that she can face off with a shark. And she was arguing with about as much concerning confidence as you seem to have, both of you.
4:20 Amory Sivertson? I wouldn't call it confidence.
4:21 Ben Brock Johnson? Get it in the eyes. Scratch its eyes. It's no problem.
4:24 Speaker 06 Yeah. But unlike you all, Emily knew exactly where she got her theory of shark defense, from TikTok.
4:32 Speaker 07 Um, I mean, I think I've watched enough TikToks that I could just like send one off. I just could. I just think I could.
4:39 Amory Sivertson? You think you could word off a shark because of TikTok?
4:44 Speaker 07 Yes, absolutely. I know what to do.
4:50 Amory Sivertson? So I asked Emily to cite her sources and she directed me to a TikTok account called Mermaid Kaylee, which I then shared with you all, with the team. Mermaid Kaylee has all these tutorials about what to do in a shark encounter.
5:04 Ben Brock Johnson? And from the looks of it, Kaylee is telling people to do what I have always heard. You know, you've just got to bop that shark right on the nose.
5:13 Amory Sivertson? She calls it redirection.
5:15 Ben Brock Johnson? There are videos like this one from November, which show a tiger shark swimming toward a camera person who then reaches out and pushes it away by the nose.
5:26 Amory Sivertson? And this one.
5:31 Amory Sivertson? The music is that TikTok sound a lot of people were using to show off how cute their boyfriends were last summer. That sped up Lizzie McAlpine's song.
5:42 Amory Sivertson? You see a shark approaching a fellow diver. The text instructs you to stay calm, not splash, and to make eye contact with the shark. And then you see the diver push the tiger shark away by the nose. I was not convinced by this whole nose bopping theory of shark protection.
6:01 Ben Brock Johnson? But these shark redirection TikToks seem to me like the latest evolution of conventional wisdom I have heard for years. And it sounds like, Amory, you have too.
6:10 Amory Sivertson? But just because it's conventional wisdom, does that mean it's true? It's a shark fighting mystery.
6:19 Ben Brock Johnson? And to solve it, we're gonna need a bigger boat.
6:21 Amory Sivertson? Oh, Jaws reference. And Jaws, at least, is a part of the problem.
6:26 Ben Brock Johnson? But let's take a swim, a voyage into the known and the deep unknown of shark fighting.
6:34 Ben Brock Johnson? I'm Ben Quint Johnson.
6:37 Amory Sivertson? I'm Amory Amity Island Sivertson.
6:40 Ben Brock Johnson? And you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from dangerous waters off the coast of WBUR in Boston. Today's episode, How to Fight a Shark.
6:51 Speaker 06 How to redirect a shark, Ben.
6:53 Amory Sivertson? Grace Tatter, keeping our episode titles honest.
6:56 Ben Brock Johnson? And less fishy.
7:13 Ben Brock Johnson? Is that a shark behind you?
7:14 Speaker 02 Yes.
7:15 Ben Brock Johnson? A few months ago, we spoke with the diver behind the popular Instagram and TikTok account that started this all, Mermaid Kaylee.
7:25 Speaker 02 Aloha. My name is Kaylee Grant. I live in Kona, Hawaii, and I own and operate an ocean safari tour called Kaimana Ocean Safari.
7:35 Ben Brock Johnson? Kaylee's main job is running tours, but she has 470,000 followers on Instagram and 2.2 million followers on TikTok.
7:47 Ben Brock Johnson? I feel like a lot of people might also call you like an influencer. Do you identify with that term? Does that feel accurate to you, influencer?
7:55 Speaker 02 Um, yeah, I, I feel like I guess I identify more with content creator. While I have brand deals every once in a while, a lot of my purpose is just to create content that is educational or helps people fall in love with sharks. Definitely not selling stuff on a regular basis besides just like love for the ocean.
8:18 Amory Sivertson? Kaylee might not be a constant influencer, but her social following is part of her business. In addition to selling her love for the ocean, Kaylee's Instagram has links and discount codes for wetsuits and a hangover cure she, quote, swears by. Also, her social media helps her get more customers to go on her guided tours of the ocean around Hawaii.
8:39 Ben Brock Johnson? It is the year of our Lord 2024, which means the lines between how you make money and who you are and what you are into are blurred. Kaylee video chatted us from her home in Hawaii and there was a shark right behind her.
8:54 Amory Sivertson? It was a picture, a picture of a shark, one of the many she has with her and her favorite animal.
8:59 Ben Brock Johnson? Scroll through either her Instagram or TikTok account and you will quickly see that the woman hangs with sharks all the time.
9:07 Amory Sivertson? There are the redirection videos.
9:09 Ben Brock Johnson? I'm splashing and acting panicked to attract this tiger shark, but as soon as I stop, you'll see she turns away. And the ones like this. When you're inside a bait ball like this, you're surrounded by walls of fish and other predators can come out at any time.
9:27 Amory Sivertson? These videos have millions of views and maybe part of what makes them so compelling is the depths of the ocean for most of us are so unknown and terrifying if I'm being honest and Kaylee seems so confident and in control.
9:44 Ben Brock Johnson? And if you go all the way back to 2019, you'll see her biggest catch, an Instagram post featuring the shark from the photo on her wall, a great white Kaylee swam with that year off the coast of Oahu. This was probably my favorite shark interaction of my life. Here's how it happened. Kaylee is out on the water on a boat. She hears from a friend on another boat about a discovery. Hey, there is a dead whale out here and there's like some interesting shark species coming up.
10:13 Amory Sivertson? While humans aren't usually on the menu for sharks, whales certainly are.
10:18 Ben Brock Johnson? Whale buffet past the tongs.
10:19 Amory Sivertson? Little shark arms, little fins holding tongs. Oh, what an image. Okay. Kaylee's with a diving company she worked for at the time. They've got the gear. They've got an appetite for destruction.
10:34 Ben Brock Johnson? Time to suit up and check out this whale carcass. They pull up to it. And then next thing you know, we just saw that big pointy nose munching on the whale.
10:44 Speaker 06 And just jumped right back in.
10:50 Ben Brock Johnson? Kaylee says, forget any Jaws propaganda you may have in your head. There was nothing to fear.
10:56 Speaker 06 She was very full. So imagine if you just eat like a really big cheeseburger or almost a whole pizza, you're going to be like couch potato mode, you know?
11:07 Amory Sivertson? This shark was blissed out.
11:10 Speaker 06 It was really, really special.
11:12 Ben Brock Johnson? Kaylee and her coworkers take a bunch of pictures and videos underwater, put them on social media.
11:18 Amory Sivertson? And these videos caught worldwide attention, particularly a video of Kaylee's coworker, a diver named Ocean Ramsey. Yes, that is her real name.
11:28 Ben Brock Johnson? This video shows Ocean swim right up to this behemoth of a creature, a 20-foot-long great white.
11:35 Amory Sivertson? Phew.
11:41 Amory Sivertson? Like Kaylee, Ocean kind of looks like a mermaid when she's in her diving gear. She has long blond hair.
11:48 Ben Brock Johnson? Her flippers move gracefully in sync, making her long legs look like a tail.
11:56 Ben Brock Johnson? In the video, Ocean swims up to this great white and holds on to her fin, a kind of handshake.
12:02 Amory Sivertson? A polite greeting, and one that went viral, viral enough that Ocean ended up on the Today Show.
12:08 Speaker 07 We are joined now from Hawaii by Ocean Ramsey, the marine biologist and shark researcher seen in those dramatic videos. Ocean, good morning. Thanks for being with us.
12:18 Speaker 06 Aloha, and thanks for having me.
12:20 Ben Brock Johnson? If sharks as a species had a PR team, this would be a big win for them, huge. Because again, when most people think about sharks, they're thinking. A young woman killed by sharks while snorkeling in the Bahamas. The shark attack in Southern California.
12:34 Speaker 04 Two shark attacks today. A girl was bitten. She had three puncture wounds.
12:38 Speaker 01 It's unclear whether it was the same shark in both attacks.
12:42 Amory Sivertson? Right. Most of the time when sharks are in the news, it bodes well neither for sharks nor people.
12:48 Ben Brock Johnson? And that's part of the reason Kaylee and Ocean say they post content about swimming with sharks in general, including these images of this great white.
12:56 Speaker 07 Ramsey has traveled the globe studying sharks and has dedicated her life to their conservation. She hopes.
13:02 Ben Brock Johnson? These stunning images will help protect what she calls the ocean's most misunderstood creatures. Great whites might be some of the biggest sharks and some of the oldest. They can live into their seventies, but they are just one of many, many species.
13:17 Amory Sivertson? Silky sharks, frilled sharks, goblin sharks, and cookie cutters. There are more than 500 in all.
13:24 Ben Brock Johnson? Sharks are sometimes referred to as living fossils because they've been around for so long. Emery, I'mma send you this photo of this old ass shark.
13:32 Amory Sivertson? Okay.
13:33 Ben Brock Johnson? I want you to take a look at this.
13:34 Amory Sivertson? Okay.
13:35 Ben Brock Johnson? It is a Greenland shark that is supposedly almost 400 years old.
13:40 Amory Sivertson? Wow. This looks like it's like it's stone, like it's just a statue. This is the goblin shark right here, a very tired goblin.
13:54 Ben Brock Johnson? Sharks have been swimming in the earth's oceans for 450 million years. They coexisted with dinosaurs and have survived every mass extinction.
14:05 Amory Sivertson? But right now is a particularly bad time to be a shark. They're being killed by fishermen. Their habitats are being destroyed or disrupted by extreme weather events.
14:15 Ben Brock Johnson? Many shark species are close to extinction, which is bad for everyone. When we lose these kinds of apex predators, entire ecosystems will be out of whack.
14:30 Ben Brock Johnson? Kaylee says conservation is a big reason why she got into sharks.
14:35 Amory Sivertson? She grew up in Pennsylvania, so no coastline. And when she became an adult, she moved to a place with a lot of coastline.
14:42 Ben Brock Johnson? And a lot of lava.
14:44 Amory Sivertson? And marine life.
14:45 Speaker 06 When I actually got to like see sharks in that deep blue, crystal clear Hawaii water, like I just became infat-
14:55 Ben Brock Johnson? Infatuation with a very specific subject matter, which is, of course, the fuel that powers the internet.
15:02 Amory Sivertson? Kaylee started working at Ocean Ramsey's diving company to spend more time around the things she loved. She started posting more videos of herself swimming with sharks. And then she started her own diving company and posted more videos of her swimming with sharks.
15:17 Ben Brock Johnson? It turns out there is a big appetite for this kind of content, specifically sharks with people content.
15:24 Amory Sivertson? A video of a shark is not necessarily going to do numbers on Instagram or TikTok, but a person touching a shark?
15:31 Ben Brock Johnson? People devour it like a tiger shark eating a minnow.
15:36 Amory Sivertson? But like with anything that goes viral on the internet, these kinds of videos have their backlash.
15:45 Ben Brock Johnson? Christian Parton is a researcher with a YouTube channel called Shark Bites, as in B-Y-T-E-S. This is from a video responding to this genre of sharks with people content.
15:57 Speaker 04 You don't need to get videos or pictures of you riding sharks to raise awareness about their conservation.
16:03 Ben Brock Johnson? Christian is, by the way, a long way away from the beaches of Hawaii. He is hanging out near the beaches of Cornwall, England. Christian, I love your neon shark light back there.
16:15 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. I get a lot of comments about that, actually. I've had it for a few years now and I absolutely love it. But I'm looking at it now going, oh, it's a little bit small. I kind of want a bigger one.
16:27 Ben Brock Johnson? We're gonna need a bigger light.
16:28 Amory Sivertson? You're gonna need a different joke.
16:33 Ben Brock Johnson? Whatever the case, Christian's take on swimming with sharks, about as far away as Cornwall is from Oahu.
16:41 Speaker 04 In the last 10 or 15 years or so, scientists have learned a lot about the dangers of harassing or disturbing wildlife.
16:48 Amory Sivertson? Christian made the point that after the reports of this shark sighting off of Oahu, a lot of people wanted to go see for themselves.
16:55 Speaker 04 Which forced the Hawaii authorities to release a statement telling people to not get in the water because, of course, it would be extremely dangerous to get into the water around a whale carcass where a white shark has been spotted. And it wasn't only dangerous for the people. It had a negative impact on the sharks as well because that following day, all those boats and all those people in the water scared the bloody Sharks away.
17:17 Ben Brock Johnson? But maybe a little tourist scrum in comparison to millions of people appreciating Kaylee's efforts is worth it? To see an animal of that size and us just like next to it. I don't know. I think it's a really like cool image to just show a different side to sharks. Christian would respectfully like to take a massive bloody bite out of this idea and murder it forever.
17:40 Amory Sivertson? So violent. You know how Kaylee calls a lot of these video tutorials of how to interact with sharks? Redirection?
17:47 Speaker 04 Years ago, there wasn't any mention about redirection. So where has that terminology come from? It's just sort of, you know, appeared. And I think it appeared because they got pushed back because people in the scientific community didn't really agree with the fact that they were touching and pushing sharks. So now they've given it official terminology.
18:06 Ben Brock Johnson? Christian would have had a lot to say at the dinner party when Grace's friend was like, I could fight off a shark, let alone redirect it.
18:13 Amory Sivertson? Because putting your hands near the pointy end of a shark.
18:17 Speaker 04 That is not good advice for your average Joe who's swimming, you know, in the ocean, snorkeling in the ocean and may encounter a shark.
18:27 Amory Sivertson? Christian says, while some Hawaii sharks are used to divers.
18:31 Speaker 04 I would challenge them maybe to go and do that with a tiger shark off Reunion Island. And to come back with both their arms, you know, I don't think that would happen.
18:45 Ben Brock Johnson? Reunion Island is in the middle of the Indian Ocean and it has the most shark attacks on humans per capita in the world.
18:53 Amory Sivertson? Which still isn't that many. There were 19 shark bites at Reunion Island between 2012 and 2021. 11 of them fatal.
19:03 Ben Brock Johnson? Apparently, Reunion Island is on a kind of shark highway between Australia and South Africa.
19:08 Amory Sivertson? Reunion Island is like a rest stop on that highway. Complete with some fast food, a bunch of coral reefs and a diverse source of prey.
19:17 Ben Brock Johnson? And when they're trying to eat a large fry, they might chomp down on a large guy. On accident. Sometimes your order gets mixed up.
19:27 Amory Sivertson? This is a good reminder that sharks are dangerous to humans in certain settings. So you might not want to stress them out, which is what Christian says is happening in these redirection videos. So I know that you're you're trying to demonstrate it to people, but it's a bit of an unnecessary thing to do, right?
19:45 Ben Brock Johnson? Because you've just sort of goaded that shark into coming a little bit closer to you, checking you out, when you could have just shown an interaction where the shark was just swimming by and ignoring you, right?
19:58 Ben Brock Johnson? This reminds me of Werner Herzog's movie, Grizzly Man. Have you ever seen this documentary, Emery?
20:04 Amory Sivertson? I have, yes. You're just like, you're just waiting. You're waiting for the inevitable to happen the whole time.
20:14 Ben Brock Johnson? Yes, you really are. And for, you know, listeners who haven't seen it, as Emery has, spoiler, it's about a man who lived in a national park in Alaska, who just loved brown bears, which includes grizzly bears, and was passionate about protecting them from poachers. Well, I'm here with one of my favorite bears. It's Mr. Chocolate. Hi, Mr. Chocolate. But he'd also interact with them a lot. He'd pet them, he'd touch them. And a lot of people actually thought he was doing the bears a disservice by habituating them to humans. I kept thinking about that criticism while Christian was talking. We as humans, I think, in recent years,
20:55 Ben Brock Johnson? have started to sort of impose ourselves on nature even more.
21:00 Amory Sivertson? And it boils down to the fact that these animals deserve our respect and deserve to just be left alone to do what they, you know, need to do, what they were evolved to do, right? They're wild animals. Humans plus wild animals in close proximity can change behaviors, not in a good way.
21:20 Ben Brock Johnson? Kim Holland is a research professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii. He's been studying sharks for three decades.
21:31 Ben Brock Johnson? Kim looked at some of these redirecting shark pointy end TikToks. One video from Kaylee's former colleague and fellow shark social media star Ocean Ramsey stuck out to Kim. In it, a tiger shark lunges out of the water towards Ocean Ramsey with its mouth open. Kim is talking to Grace Tatter here.
21:51 Speaker 06 That is a behavior you never see in in nature. And that, to me, is all the evidence of a shark saying to itself, oh, here comes that boat. I recognize the noise. And pretty soon, there's going to be some food around here. Does it put the shark at danger to kind of have that reaction to boats? No, I don't think it puts the shark at danger, but it certainly puts people at danger.
22:18 Amory Sivertson? More putting people and sharks in danger in a minute.
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23:58 Speaker 07 I grew up thinking that sharks were jaws, right? That's typically the image that often comes to mind. These big, mindless, man-eating machines.
24:06 Amory Sivertson? Alex McInturf is a marine biologist at the Big Fish Lab at Oregon State University.
24:12 Ben Brock Johnson? And she has a similar story to Christian and Kaylee, a landlubber who dreamed of the sea.
24:18 Amory Sivertson? Her childhood in Ohio predated Instagram, but she thinks she would have loved content like Ocean's and Kaylee's.
24:25 Speaker 07 I grew up without constant access to the ocean. I was really outdoorsy and adventurous. And to see someone who had the luxury of being in the water all the time as a 12-year-old, that would have been really fascinating to me.
24:41 Ben Brock Johnson? Alex does all kinds of marine research. Basking sharks in Ireland, spiny dogfish in Oregon, shark moms in North Carolina. She's keeping tabs on them all.
24:51 Amory Sivertson? But she also thinks a lot about science communication and how researchers can contribute to the messaging about sharks.
24:58 Ben Brock Johnson? It's a delicate dance.
24:59 Amory Sivertson? Swim. It's a delicate swim.
25:01 Ben Brock Johnson? Hmm, it's a delicate swim.
25:06 Speaker 07 You're much more likely to be killed by a coconut falling on your head than you are by a shark. That being said, the other misconception is actually the opposite, that they don't want to hurt you and that they're animals that you can go out and touch and hang out with. That's not really true either. They are predators, and I think our fear of them is actually pretty healthy. And so I think that's something that you need to consider. They're not sort of these two extremes. They're somewhere in the middle, right? They're wild animals.
25:32 Amory Sivertson? Alex says she really worries about people not being scared enough and trying to copy divers with a lot more expertise.
25:39 Ben Brock Johnson? It's not that a lot of the information in these videos about how to redirect sharks is wrong. It's just that a 30-second TikTok is inherently incomplete.
25:50 Amory Sivertson? These videos also generalize shark behavior, when in reality, different species of sharks are going to respond to people differently. Sharks in different places are going to respond differently. Animals can be unpredictable, sharks and humans.
26:05 Ben Brock Johnson? I think it's really important here to note that while we can't say the same for all shark influencers, Kaylee often has long, detailed captions noting that she's professionally trained and that sharks are apex predators and not to do this at home.
26:21 Amory Sivertson? But do people actually read those captions if she's not saying it in the video?
26:25 Ben Brock Johnson? No, we never read the captions. Do you read the captions, Anne Marie? You don't read the captions. We don't read the captions.
26:30 Amory Sivertson? I don't pretend for a second that I could do any of this in reality. Even though my brain knows to punch the nose, I'm thinking about Alex saying like, "I'm worried people are gonna think it's too easy." And if there were a shark mouth open in front of my face, I think I would just straight up panic. But yes, even the people who do read the captions, maybe they take them out of context.
26:53 Ben Brock Johnson? We asked Kaylee if she worries about this. For sure. I mean, that's something we have to be really cautious about. And I've had pages that want to repost or share my videos. And I'll be like, okay, you can share it with credit to me or whatever. And they'll be like, oh, can you send me the video without the text on it? And I'm like, no, the text on the video is very important because it's showing you, like, it's not just saying, "This shark is chasing me. I'm such a badass. I'm gonna push it away." Like, it's showing you the steps. Like, if you're in this situation, try this. If it keeps happening, try this. So like, context and not villainizing the sharks or promoting something that is harmful for the animals or the people.
27:38 Ben Brock Johnson? It's definitely a fine line. Still, as every content creator knows, you can't control what people do with your work once it's out there. Like, how do you, as a person whose intentions are good, stay in control of what the outcome is of the things you're putting into the world? How do you think about that? I haven't really had any negative outcomes. So maybe one day, that's something that I'll have to deal with. I mean, we're working with sharks, so anything can happen to anyone, even myself. Like, I could be bitten by a shark one day, you know what I mean? But is that gonna stop me from seeing their beauty and obsessing over them and wanting to spend time with them? Like, no.
28:22 Amory Sivertson? Kaylee is awfully casual about the possibility of a shark bite.
28:26 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah, and I hate to say it, but this all made me think about Grizzly Man again, the documentary about the conservationist who hung out with brown bears in Alaska. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. Because, Emery, you remember how that ended.
28:42 Amory Sivertson? Yes, and I'm so glad you brought up this example because I couldn't help but think about it from the beginning of this. Like, the guy who thinks that he is the one who has built the relationship with the grizzly bears gets mauled to death by a grizzly bear.
28:57 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah, he and his girlfriend both get mauled to death.
29:00 Amory Sivertson? Oh, I forgot about that. I forgot about the girlfriend.
29:03 Ben Brock Johnson? And they were actually recording themselves at the time. So there's a recording, and it's pretty awful.
29:09 Amory Sivertson? You don't see it, though. You hear it, right?
29:11 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah, you hear it.
29:12 Amory Sivertson? Yeah, that's bad enough.
29:15 Ben Brock Johnson? And then park officials had to kill that bear.
29:19 Amory Sivertson? Huh, and this is where Jaws comes back in, right? A shark hurts or kills a human, you get a bunch of news stories, and it feeds into this idea of sharks as man-eating machines.
29:31 Ben Brock Johnson? Yeah, and all of a sudden, everyone's trying to kill them. It's an age-old story. Wolves, sharks, lions, tigers, bears.
29:38 Amory Sivertson? Oh, my.
29:41 Ben Brock Johnson? Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel Jaws was based on, went on to vocally repent for the harm he feels his work has done on sharks.
29:50 Amory Sivertson? A few years ago, Steven Spielberg told the BBC that he also feels remorse. That's one of the things I still fear, not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975, which I truly, and to this day, regret. The decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film.
30:14 Ben Brock Johnson? After the book was published and the movie was released, there was a shark-hunting frenzy.
30:19 Amory Sivertson? People thought of them as monsters to be captured and killed, instead of animals to be protected.
30:25 Ben Brock Johnson? The large shark population off the East Coast was cut by half. The stories we tell about sharks matter.
30:33 Amory Sivertson? Now, it's illegal to kill great whites in all US waters. But some people want to change that in places like Cape Cod, where shark sightings have become far more frequent over the past decade or so.
30:45 Speaker 00 26-year-old Arthur Medici died Saturday after being bitten by a shark.
30:50 Amory Sivertson? Accompanied by a lot of scary headlines that continue to be a part of the tricky nature of how we tell shark stories.
30:57 Speaker 01 Listen as the beachgoers panic, screaming, running out of the water.
31:02 Amory Sivertson? And how that storytelling influences our behavior.
31:05 Speaker 01 Screaming like a lunatic, call 911, there's been a shark attack.
31:11 Amory Sivertson? Suffice it to say, it's important to keep thinking about how we talk about sharks. Because shark encounters aren't going away. We've seen headlines about shark attacks in Texas and Florida, and a fatal attack in Hawaii, all just within the last couple of weeks at the time that we're recording this. And how we talk about these incidents, and about sharks in general, influences our behavior.
31:35 Ben Brock Johnson? Which is why some of the scientists say that social media can be a powerful tool to get people to care about sharks. But you have to do it right. You have to redirect it.
31:47 Amory Sivertson? Ooh, I like it. I'm picking up what you're putting down, Johnson. I'm chomping what you're chumming.
31:55 Ben Brock Johnson? So there hasn't been much research on social media and how it affects our behavior around sharks, yet. But there has been research on ecotourism, like the tours that Kaylee runs and promotes on her social media, and how that shapes conservation efforts with mixed results.
32:13 Amory Sivertson? Some studies have found that shark-focused ecotourism makes people much more likely to engage in shark conservation.
32:21 Ben Brock Johnson? While other studies have shown that ecotourism can negatively affect sharks by disrupting their behavior.
32:28 Amory Sivertson? Maybe TikTok and Instagram can be a less disruptive way for people to get excited about sharks.
32:34 Ben Brock Johnson? Alex McIntyre from Oregon would love to see more researchers wade into the social media waters.
32:41 Speaker 07 More often than not, though, I think it's really critical for scientists to be online and doing outreach and being on social media because it's better to have folks get information directly from us than try to interpret what's going on in the media, which for sharks is often a little sensationalized.
32:58 Ben Brock Johnson? The problem is, we know that the most accurate content, or most informative content, isn't always what travels the farthest.
33:06 Amory Sivertson? That's not only a problem for sharks, it's also been, not great to say the least, for democracy, containing pandemics, et cetera, et cetera.
33:15 Ben Brock Johnson? The list goes on. Alex says that scientists need to adapt their communication to audiences on social media. Research Paper Ease isn't going to cut it on Insta.
33:26 Amory Sivertson? Just like diving or research practices, this is something people can be trained in.
33:32 Speaker 07 We might tell you generally, oh, this is a specific type of shark and this is what we're trying to learn about it, right? We're not going to go into the statistical analyses that we're going to use to do that, because that's not super interesting to people. But in science, that is interesting. And so we have to learn to cater our message to different audiences. And sometimes I think that translation doesn't work super well for social media if you're not well-versed in using it.
33:55 Ben Brock Johnson? And here perhaps is an opportunity. We need scientists to get better at influencing. But we also need influencers to get better at sciencing. In other words, Christian and Alex might say that Kaylee and Ocean are a little dangerous in the way they're putting things into the world. Could they be cordially, gently, purposefully redirected?
34:21 Amory Sivertson? You don't need a degree to help the sharks. Maybe there's a way some of these influencers can join forces with full-time researchers and train them up in viral content.
34:31 Speaker 07 This is an animal that has been villainized for decades, and it's really affected, actually, support for their conservation and their numbers, which I think influencers also state. So any way to sort of combat that negative stigma, I think, is a good first step.
34:48 Ben Brock Johnson? So while some maniac might make the argument that Amory, you and I are influencers, we are definitely not scientists. So we did what we could do to do our part.
34:59 Amory Sivertson? We didn't even have to get out the chum bucket. Or maybe we did, in a way. We called up Kaylee and we called up Christian and we threw some food for thought amongst the waves. And we stayed on the boat and got some rays while they settled the shark touching TikTok debate once and for all.
35:17 Speaker 04 I've swum with loads of shark species before and filmed sharks while I've been out in the ocean. And people have filmed me when I've been with sharks in the ocean. But I've never felt the need to go and touch that shark just to try and prove to everyone else that these guys aren't mindless serial killing machines. I totally understand that mindset and why that is important, especially for research. But at the same time, when humans don't have a connection with animals,
35:49 Amory Sivertson? I think that they care a lot less about them. In general, we protect what we love and getting to have some sort of connection or interaction with an animal can be the difference between that animal getting saved, protection. OK, we didn't actually get Christian and Kaylee on the same boat. We tried to at least get them on the same video call, but we couldn't get their schedules to align. Kaylee did say, though, that she'd be down to work with Christian and other scientists in the future to talk through their differences. And she told us she already works with some researchers, including Shark Tagger, an effort led by a group of researchers studying shark behavior in Hawaii.
36:33 Ben Brock Johnson? And for his part, Christian said he's down for collaborating.
36:37 Speaker 04 I'd be open to seeing what happens. I'm happy to have a chat with Kaylee and hear what she has to say.
36:42 Ben Brock Johnson? Do you remember how Jaws ends, Amory? It's anti-shark propaganda for sure.
36:47 Amory Sivertson? The ending is a very, very bad one for the shark.
36:51 Ben Brock Johnson? Explosive.
36:52 Amory Sivertson? It's a huge explosion, too. You'd think the shark was like 100 feet long.
36:59 Ben Brock Johnson? It's true. But hear me out. The final scene is of a scientist and a layman swimming off together, having found mutual respect in pursuit of a common goal.
37:12 Speaker 04 The tide's with us.
37:15 Speaker 04 Keep kicking.
37:20 Amory Sivertson? That's our show, folks, in honor of Shark Week 2024. If you're wondering, by the way, about initiatives you can support to support sharks, the shark experts we spoke to for this episode said that there are policies you can push for.
37:34 Ben Brock Johnson? Regulating industrial fisheries to reduce shark bycatch.
37:38 Amory Sivertson? Making shark hunting illegal, or, in the case of Cape Cod, keeping shark hunting illegal.
37:43 Ben Brock Johnson? Devoting resources to cleaning the seas of industrial debris that sharks get stuck in.
37:49 Amory Sivertson? All things that help sharks just be sharks without us getting in their faces. Oh, and speaking of the experts, a quick note that an earlier version of this episode misidentified Alex McInturf as a marine biologist at the University of Oregon instead of Oregon State University. We do not regret the error. Go Ducks! Just kidding, we hate to get it wrong, and we gotta own it when we do. Go Beavers!
38:25 Ben Brock Johnson? This episode of Endless Thread was produced by Grace Tatter and our podcast news fellow, C.C. You.
38:31 Amory Sivertson? It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and me.
38:33 Ben Brock Johnson? Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The rest of our team is Paul Vicas, Suma Tojoshi, Dean Russell, and Mia Giuliani.
38:41 Amory Sivertson? Endless Thread is a podcast about the blurred lines between online communities and being shark bait.
38:47 Ben Brock Johnson? If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, a bucket of chum that you want to throw at us, just send us an email at [email protected] . And I guess that's all. We're going for a swim.
39:22 Speaker 00 Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.
39:44 Speaker 06 I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.
39:49 Speaker 04 And just to explain why you're excited about it.
39:51 Speaker 06 Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.
40:23 Speaker 00 Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.
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